On Monday last week, the Pentagon released
the 2008 edition of its legislatively mandated
Annual Report to Congress: Military Power of the
People's Republic of China. While Pentagon
analysts' estimate that Beijing's military
spending last year was as high as US$139 billion -
a figure which represents 4.23% of China's gross
domestic product (GDP) and more than three times
its publicly announced defense budget - occasioned
some buzz in defense circles, overall the report
passed unnoticed, especially when one contrasts
the attention it received with the headlines
generated by some of its predecessors.
Even Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense
David Sedney, briefing journalists on the report,
tried to downplay the document's significance,
noting that "there's no one big dramatic change"
and that "the real story is the continuing
development, the continuing
modernization, the continuing
acquisition of capabilities and the corresponding
and unfortunate lack of understanding, lack of
transparency about the intentions of those and how
they are going to be employed".
Actually,
a comparison of the 2008 report and the six which
preceded it show that whatever its effects on the
global stage, China's defense buildup has already
altered the military balance in the Taiwan Strait.
In the 2002 report, for example, the Pentagon
could still reassure itself with the knowledge
that the air forces of the Republic of China (ROC)
on Taiwan not only have "enjoyed dominance of the
airspace over the Taiwan Strait for many years",
but still maintained "a qualitative edge over" the
PLA Air Force (PLAAF).
In contrast, the
new report observes that the PLAAF and the PLA
Navy now have approximately 2,250 operational
combat aircraft, of which 490 are positioned
within range of Taiwan and could conduct
operations against the island without refueling.
It also warns that "this number could be
significantly increased through any combination of
aircraft forward deployment, decreased ordnance
loads, or altered mission profiles". Against the
waves of fighters, ground attack planes,
fighter-bombers and bombers - many of them
fourth-generation aircraft - which Beijing could
potentially send against it, Taipei only has some
390 fighters, most of which are American F-16s,
French Mirage 2000s and Taiwan's own Indigenous
Defense Fighters (IDFs), which rely on 1970s and
1980s technology.
The naval balance has
also shifted. Taiwan's navy has a total of 97
ships, more than half of which are missile-armed
coastal patrol boats. With 232 ships, the PLA navy
is the largest force of principal combatants,
submarines and amphibious warfare vessels in Asia.
Together, its closest naval forces to Taiwan, the
Dinghai-based East Fleet and the Zhan Jiang-based
South Fleet, include a nuclear attack submarine,
32 diesel-powered attack submarines, 17
destroyers, 36 frigates, 47 amphibious assault
ships and 35 missile patrol craft.
Even
more ominously, the PLA has progressively
increased both the quality and the quantity of its
short-range ballistic missile (SRBM) systems
which, in the event of conflict, could, according
to the Pentagon report, be deployed against air
defense systems "to support a campaign to degrade
Taiwan's defenses, neutralize Taiwan's military
and political leadership, and possibly break the
Taiwan people's will to fight".
What is
the United States to make of this changed security
situation? On the one hand, albeit with differing
emphases, Washington has consistently opposed any
unilateral changes in the status quo along the
Taiwan Strait and supported a peaceful resolution
of differences. On the other hand, there is no
denying that Beijing's "peaceful rise" to the
status of a global economic power has given it the
resources to also become a major diplomatic and
military force - and thus necessarily a concern
for the world's sole superpower.
The
Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 stipulated some
fundamental tenets of the balance which Washington
has tried to strike, determining that while the
United States might establish diplomatic relations
with China, it remained US policy "to preserve and
promote extensive, close, and friendly commercial,
cultural, and other relations between the people
of the United States and the people on Taiwan" and
that attempts to coerce the island constituted "a
threat to the peace and security of the Western
Pacific area and of grave concern to the United
States". To this end, Congress pledged "the United
States will make available to Taiwan such defense
articles and defense services in such quantity as
may be necessary to enable Taiwan to maintain a
sufficient self-defense capability".
Unfortunately, owing largely to
the internal political dynamics of the
country's remarkable democratic transformation during
the last decade, Taipei's politicians have not
always availed themselves of the offers made
by Washington, especially during the George W Bush
administration, but also under president Bill
Clinton. The long-ruling Kuomintang (KMT), the
party of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, finding
itself in the unaccustomed role of political
opposition to the Democratic Progressive Party
(DPP), more often than not blocked the special
defense procurement budgets submitted by the
government of President Chen Shui-bian for
submarines, P-3C Orion planes and Patriot missile
batteries which the United States, after a long
hiatus, had offered to make available in 2001.
Fortunately, after years of declining
defense expenditures, there are indications that
the corner has been turned. Last June, a
long-delayed $8.9 billion defense budget finally
passed the Legislative Yuan. The appropriation
represented 2.65% of Taiwan's GDP and included
funding for twelve of the P-3C maritime patrol
aircraft, six Patriot missile system upgrades and
a feasibility study for the possible purchase of
eight diesel-electric submarines.
Funding
was also made available for upgrading the island
nation's precision munitions, including acquiring
late model air-to-air missiles, air-to-surface
missiles and advanced conventional stand-off
missiles. In December, the legislature passed a
$10.5 billion defense budget - a 12% increase on
the spending bill it approved just six months
earlier - which will include the purchase of three
PAC-III missile defense batteries. (Ironically,
after so many years with tight budgets, the recent
plenty apparently overwhelmed the civilian defense
bureaucracy and a scandal involving a private firm
brought in to handle major arms purchases led to
the resignation of Defense Minister Lee Tian-yu
last month.)
Meanwhile, though the shift
is nowhere near complete, Taiwan's armed forces
have been trying to transform themselves
internally from a mass-conscript military into an
all-volunteer force while simultaneously improving
its joint operating and other capabilities.
Significantly, whatever their other
differences, the urgency of investing in Taiwan's
self-defense and modernizing its military has not
been lost on the two major candidates in the
presidential election which will be held on Taiwan
on March 22.
KMT standard-bearer Ma
Ying-jeou, while favoring improved ties with the
mainland, has also declared that an arms buildup
was necessary in order to achieve that goal: "We
must build leaner but stronger forces ... in the
face of the Chinese communists' fast military
expansion." Speaking to a strategic seminar last
month, the former mayor of Taipei said that such
forces "must be capable of crushing out the enemy
from the onset in case of war" so that "the
Chinese communists would drop the idea of taking
Taiwan at a minimum cost". Ma's DPP opponent,
former premier Frank Hsieh, has likewise stressed
the importance of defense spending: "Taiwan needs
to continue buying defense equipment and to make
its defense budget more than three percent of
GDP."
If Taiwan continues upgrading its
defense capabilities, as appears likely
irrespective of the election results, it will also
be indirectly advancing US interests in the
western Pacific rim, both strategically vis-a-vis
China's ambitions for regional hegemony and
operationally as a potential partner in the event
of a security or even humanitarian crisis in the
region. Carefully managed, a policy of actively
helping Taiwan help itself will pay healthy
dividends into America's East Asian and even
global geopolitical accounts.
J Peter Pham is
director of the Nelson Institute for International
and Public Affairs at James Madison University and
a senior fellow of the Foundation for the Defense
of Democracies.
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